Ibrahim Mohmed  - Taja.ai

On the Being Real: "The first element is you have to be authentic. So it's about what's authentic to you."

The world of business gets moving with marketing, and marketing now happens via social media platforms.  These platforms love short form video, to keep our attention spans short and our eyes on the next ad, err, video.

But creating short form videos from long format videos takes time.  Going through and editing down every bit of profound short video used to take hours.  But the ever present question now is, can AI do this?

Ibrahim Mohmed founded Taja.ai to solve this problem.  A problem he was having with his marketing agency.  After building out Taja with his partner, he now offers a robust and useful platform to create video shorts, along with many other useful bits of content, in minutes, rather than hours.  Best of all, they aren't your minutes, the computer does the work and you can do other things.

Listen as Ibrahim explains how the idea for Taja.ai came to him and his partner, how they built it, what they have learned and how they are continuously working on improving it.

Enjoy!

Visit Ibrahim at Taja.ai

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/growwithtaja/

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 "Taj's AI-Driven Transformation Journey"

06:23 "Transitioning to Software Products"

08:25 "Emotional Creative Entrepreneurs"

11:37 "Shifting Focus: Diversifying Platforms"

16:29 "Becoming an Authentic Influencer"

17:23 Maximizing Watch Time for Platforms

23:25 College Connection Sparks Startup Venture

24:14 ChatGPT's Role in Agency Launch

29:43 Content Creation Tools and Scheduling

33:35 Streamlined Video Content Expansion

36:19 Improving AI-Generated Video Shorts

39:31 Automated Video and Blog Creation

42:06 "Video-Based System Advantage"

Podcast Transcription:

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:00:00]:

The first thing is these algorithms care about watch time more than anything. And what watch time is essentially how long is someone watching your piece of content? And if the. The higher the watch time of your content is, the higher the algorithm will pick it up and showcase it to more people. Because it's signaling to the algorithm that as a result of your video, people are staying on the platform longer. And so as a result, these platforms can serve more ads, these people, and then that platforms make more money as a result. So watch time is huge.

James Kademan [00:00:41]:

You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and strength and successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link funded drawincustomers.com we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business Book. And today we're welcoming, preparing to learn from Ibrahim. Oh, my gosh, is it Mohammed Mohmed? Yep, Mohmed. All right. Founder of Taja. Let me try that again. We are welcoming Slash, preparing to learn from Ibrahim Momed, founder of Taja who.

James Kademan [00:01:17]:

I gotta say, Ibrahim, I'm excited because we were just talking about this before. We create shorts with this software. So we're talking about, or talking to the founder of a guy that's you, that created a product that we're actually using. So that's kind of monumental in our world. So I'm excited. So, Ibrahim, how is it going today?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:01:37]:

No, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm happy to hear that you guys are using Taj actively. And my day's going well. Weeks going well. It's crazy that we're in September, but mid September, that is. But yeah, just trudging through and trying to end the year on a high note.

James Kademan [00:01:54]:

Yeah, fair. Tell me just a quick history. I know my experience with Taja, but I have no idea how old the software is or really how you got started. So let's start with how long have you been around?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:02:06]:

Yeah, Taj has been around for 26 months. So two years and two months. We started back in December of 2022. Basically. I ran an agency before that, managed influencers, helped them build and monetize their content on social, primarily YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, all the ones that have AdSense revenue associated with them. And we had a lot of clients that had podcasts on YouTube, but we just didn't have the bandwidth or demand or. Or we didn't have the bandwidth to keep up with it. And so at that time, you know, Chat GBT had just rolled out, so my partner and I started looking at how AI could affect our business and help us streamline our business.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:03:01]:

So we, you know, went on this whole discovery realm and under, you know, looked at what are the key pain points, identified those key pain points, and then we use Taja as the tool to help us streamline the business. And then in July 2023, we decided to roll it out to everyone.

James Kademan [00:03:20]:

That's awesome. So the. Has it worked for your clients that were using you to market or essentially, if I understand correctly, they were looking to become influencers.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:03:32]:

They were already influenced. So the clients I used to work with, they were already influencers. They were like prominent NBA players, former NBA players. They just wanted to get in the media space. So they wanted us to run their podcast, essentially repurpose their podcast into multiple forms of media, such as, you know, clips, shorts, etc, and put it up on their channels. So we were running their clips channels actually for them. And, you know, the first channel we ever built was, you know, went from 0 to 100k subscribers and 14 months using Tasha.

James Kademan [00:04:08]:

Well, it's incredible. That is super incredible. Tell me a story about the back end. Because, Chad, GPT comes out, the AI revolution essentially is happening, and really got fired up. I mean, what are we talking November 22nd?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:04:22]:

Yeah, November. December 22nd. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:04:25]:

So did you have a background, a programming background to help you figure out how to turn the AI and use it as a tool to build this whole program or how did that work?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:04:35]:

No, my partner did. My partner, he's an engineer. He's been in building AI tools since, like 2015. He's been in the space, so he's understood it. Well, all that. He actually sent me chatgpt and he's like, hey, this thing just came out. Do you think it could help your business at all? And then that's when we started just going down the discovery lane and figuring out what can work. And then he.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:01]:

He was the one building it and I was the one, you know, putting in people's hands, testing it out and. And selling it.

James Kademan [00:05:10]:

That's awesome. So when did you decide to actually spin it off to a product that you offered independent of the other services that you had with your other business?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:20]:

Yeah, July 2023. We decided to do that.

James Kademan [00:05:23]:

Okay, and was that a big conversation to decide to do that versus just keeping it more or less in house?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:29]:

No, not a big conversation. I think we were always building for like, an element of. Of. Of putting it out to the masses. It was Just figuring out what's the pain points. How can we leverage the agency and the relationships we have with the agency to build something that'd be useful for a lot of people. So that was always the, the forefront. I've always wanted to be in the product space just because the impact's greater, the scalability is higher, and, you know, you, you own the product in comparison that, you know, as an agency, the, you know, the.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:06:08]:

You have a few clients and you're kind of at the mercy of those clients. Product the same thing. You're at the mercy of the customer, but it's more of a partnership than it is, you know, from a, from, from working with a client.

James Kademan [00:06:23]:

You know, it's interesting you say that, because one of my previous guests, pretty recently, he was in more of a physical product space, I believe, or service. Whatever it was, he wanted to transition to a software product because he said, we just want to sell usernames and passwords. And it made me think, like, oh, that is pretty smart. Shy of the whole tech support and updating the software and all that kind of stuff. Your customer base possibility is way bigger, incredibly larger than what you could do with selling a physical product or something of that nature. So that's cool. I like that idea. Ibrahim, the.

James Kademan [00:07:04]:

Do you still have the marketing business essentially for influencers?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:09]:

Yeah, but it's like, not as active as it used to be. It's more on autopilot. We have some clients on Snapchat, we manage, but that's more, you know, a lot of things are on autopilot there.

James Kademan [00:07:20]:

Gotcha. So is Taja taking up more of your time now?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:24]:

Yes, Taja has taken up more of my time.

James Kademan [00:07:26]:

All right. And was that anticipated when you created it or that just evolved over the course of the past couple years?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:33]:

It was anticipated. I wanted to dial back. Like I said, I wanted to work on a product over a service just because it's a lot of times in the service industry, like I said, you're at mercy to the client or like, you know, especially what I was doing. You're, you know, your days and your workflow is dictated by how the client's feeling. And so those were things that were just too unpredictable. So I didn't want to be in that space.

James Kademan [00:08:04]:

Tell me a little bit about dealing with influencers.